What are you reading in 2023?

[HawaiiSteveO]

It's been years, read Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy in a week. 3/4 of the way through Executive Orders, having a blast.

Before the 'Sanderlanche' there was the Clancy . . . err, Clancy Epic-osityfinales ?!

My interest kind of petered out back in the day after The Bear and the Dragon. I guess his estate licensed his name, as it's still showing up on stuff today. The man could spin a great yarn, that's for dang sure.

 

[Hriston]

It's funny, Michael Moorcock intensely prefers the original version of The Broken Sword.

I wanted to read the original but couldn't find a copy. Once I read the foreword, I was won over by the idea that maybe the author had learned a thing or two about writing novels in the twenty or so years that had elapsed.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I wanted to read the original but couldn't find a copy. Once I read the foreword, I was won over by the idea that maybe the author had learned a thing or two about writing novels in the twenty or so years that had elapsed.

I've yet to confirm it, but supposedly the Gollancz edition is the original text.

 

[Richards]

I'm back from my week-long business trip, and I finished up Shadow of the Knife - it was really good. I'll have to keep Kenneth R. McKay on my radar; he's earned an automatic read of any book of his I might discover. And here's an odd thing I noticed about this book: his name doesn't appear anywhere on the cover, and only his last name shows up on the spine. He's either very unconcerned about getting his name out there, or he was new enough he didn't know to fight the publisher to get his name on the cover. In any case, I was impressed with the book.

The second book I read and finished was Red Rain by R. L. Stine - yes, the very same author behind the "Goosebumps" series of horror stories for kids, although this one was definitely written for an adult audience. The basic story is a woman rescues two twins on an island off South Carolina that's flattened by a hurricane and takes them home to her family, where she wants them to blend in. But there's something very evil about the kids, who exhibit some interesting power along the lines of mental domination and pyrokinesis. I figured out the plot twist about the two kids fairly early on, but missed another "obvious in hind sight" twist, and then it ended in a very Stephen King manner. I would recommend this book as well.

The third book is Cold Truth by Mariah Stewart, and I specifically saved that one for today's airport wait and plane trip. I gave myself a scare when I first started it, for the author has won a bunch of "romantic novel" awards and I feared I had picked up a romance novel by mistake (that was to be my only source of entertainment for the whole trip back home), but I'm over a hundred pages into it and not a romantic plot to be found. Phew! It is, as described on the back cover, a novel about a serial killer starting back up his string of deaths in his hometown after a 26-year absence, and the people trying to find him and put a stop to his death spree: a detective in the small town where the killings have started back up again, and the daughter of a recently-slain "true crime" author who had some valuable notes about the killer that might bring some insight into who he is. And now, about 100 pages in, there's also an FBI agent being sent to meet with the author's daughter, so he might be brought into the fold as well. And who knows, there might even be some sort of romantic plotline between him and the female detective, but so far the novel has been engaging so I'd still want to see it to its conclusion. (Although my eyeballs got tired on the plane and I ended up napping instead of continuing on with the story.)

Johnathan

 

[trappedslider]

It's been years, read Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy in a week. 3/4 of the way through Executive Orders, having a blast.

Before the 'Sanderlanche' there was the Clancy . . . err, Clancy Epic-osityfinales ?!

My interest kind of petered out back in the day after The Bear and the Dragon. I guess his estate licensed his name, as it's still showing up on stuff today. The man could spin a great yarn, that's for dang sure.

After The bear and the Dragon his politics really starts to show, my understanding is that one author does the main Jack ryan novels and another does the Jack Ryan jr/The Campus novels.

 

[Saracenus]

Currently I am Reading a hardbound collection of all the Earthsea books (Ursula LeGuin) and it is amazing. There some essays from LeGuin about her series. I have the annotated American Gods (Neil Gaiman) to read, present form my wife during Xmas. Also in the warm-up circle is a collection of the Witcher Novels (Andrzej Sapkowski), The Daevabad Trilogy (S. A Chakraborty) starting with The City of Brass, and finally The Peripheral and, it's sequel, The Agency (William Gibson).

 

[Imaculata]

I'm reading Elvira's biography. My friend, who gifted it to me, even had it signed for me.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

On book 3 of Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy. I really love it, and the world building is excellent. Every once in a while, the protag's perspective I don't relate with - she tries so hard to be irascible. But I can get past it, and overall I'd give it an A. We'll see how she wraps the whole thing up, exactly halfway through book 3. Then I'll be reading a bunch of zinequest/zinemonth zines

 

[Alzrius]

Having finished this, I was going to move on to a recently-purchased copy of The Descent of Ishtar, but for some reason found myself pulling my unread copy of Lewis Carroll in Numberland off the shelf.

Although it's not wrong to classify this as the biography of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the presentation leans strongly into his mathematical undertakings, rather than the whimsy for which he's known today (though that's here too). I'm only two chapters in, but it's almost like the book can't quite decide if it wants to cover his life in general, or his mathematical interests in particular, and is trying to split the difference. It'll be interesting to see where this goes.

Having finished Lewis Carroll in Numberland, I can say that it turned out to be far more focused on his mathematical work than on his overall life. While it's still a biography in that it follows his life chronologically, and gives minimal observance to other major events of his childhood and professional career, these are presented largely to provide the context in which he worked on his math puzzles. And those puzzles are replete throughout the book, which wouldn't be an issue if they weren't such expansive, complex problems!

I enjoy recreational math – among my friends, I refer to D&D as "a game of combat algebra" – but Lewis Carroll in Numberland makes it very clear that Dodgson was operating several levels above what I'm capable of reaching, or at least not without some serious remedial studying! As such, I don't recommend the book to anyone who isn't either a hardcore fan of his work (there's only a little Alice-related material in the book) or a serious mathematicaphile.

In the meantime, on to The Descent of Ishtar.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I finished Welcome to Dragon Talk. Good and wholesome, filled with passion for D&D. It could've done with some stronger fact-checking - just little things like a line about how a person "began gaming in the 70s with the Red Box."

Now I'm reading Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Forging the Darksword.